French was the second foreign language I learnt. I had always wanted to learn French, and at high school I had the opportunity to do so. I excelled in it, maybe because of natural ability. French taught me not only an entirely new way of thinking of languages, including English and its own morphology and syntax, nor expanded my bilingual vocabulary (I will expand upon this later) immensely, but also taught me the importance and benefits of understanding syntax.

Bilingual vocabulary is my way of saying - I can read English now and almost certainly know what language it came from originally. I can also read and categorise

  • French extracts within predominantly English (or other language) texts - such as Tolstoy’s War and Peace
  • English words of French or Latin origin - such as terms of predominantly higher prestige
  • French phrases in English contexts - such as à la carte

That helps me understand the connotations of not only the individual word, but also the phrase, sentence and entire context of the word or group of words. Doing VCE English Language helped with this considerably as well. For example, words of higher prestige, scientific language and words that can be nominalised are generally of Greco-Latinate origin - this can reflect the context of wanting to build your credos, convey specific ideas etc - I won’t go into this in depth. Study VCE English Language if you’re interested.

I’ve delved into a language history (as well as the history of the colonisation of England which had a profound impact on its language) a little here, so it would be ignorant to know French but not understand the relationships between it and other languages. Knowing relationships between languages helps confirm a range of linguistic quirks and comparisons, and has tremendously changed the way I see the world. Let me over-simplify it

  • In the beginning (not really) of Eurasia, it was hypothesised that there was PIE - Proto-Indo-European
  • This became Proto-Hellenic (Ancient Greek, which wasn’t a single language - again, oversimplified), Proto-Italic (Latin), Proto-Germanic (Germanic languages)
  • Latin - after the dominance of the Roman Empire, specifically dialects of Vulgar Latin spread across the lands and became the Romantic languages, where they mixed with local tongues. French deviated the most away from Latin. There, of course, are also Spanish, Portuguese, Spanish and other modern languages.
  • Germanic languages included English which arrived in Britain as Anglo-Saxon in the 5th century
    • French conquered Britain, bringing many French terms into English
    • The Renaissance and continual use of Latin in religion and science
  • Greek is often the language of medicine, pathology and terminology, given the Greek culture of learning and philosophy
  • The evolution of alphabets and scripts is fascinating in of itself

On top of the vocabulary points that I’ve already mentioned, French has taught me

  • The tenses - including the differences between English translations of the same tense eg French present tense translates into both the simple present (I eat) and the present progressive/continuous (I am eating)
  • Person and number - we don’t think about these in English because we only conjugate for third person singular
  • Moods and how they persist in English - most noticeably almost archaic subjunctive constructions (which indicate hypothetical situations and which are also considered more formal) which most native speakers don’t consciously adopt
    • Should he arrive on time, …
    • I suggest that he come on time…
    • There’s another common construction which I will fill in
  • Singular vs plural ‘you’
    • Including the fact that ‘you’ can be plural in English - I feel this is oft neglected
    • Including irregular conjugation of the second person in English
  • Verb copularity - which introduce complement
  • Verb transitivity
    • Direct and indirect objects - these are encoded in French grammar much more sophisticatedly
    • Verbs that take ‘etre’ indicating change of motion / state - which are also often intransitive
    • This can help with learning Latin as well
  • How many English have strict verbal structures and verbal phrase structures which reflect the literal origin of meanings
  • Even something as simple as ‘Je m’appelle …’, which follows a stricter reflexive structure, or more informally ‘Moi c’est …’- compared to English ‘I am …’ or ‘My name is…’ - a natural tendency to complement a noun
  • the reasons for conjugation (it came from Latin which has conjugation) and also the reasons for conjugation death (in English, which granted is a Germanic language)
    • The reason for enclitic and apostrophe of possession death as well and the benefits of preposition
    • The persistence of third person singular conjugations in English
  • apart from the basic SVO order, how loose the English sentence structure is comparatively and what that reflects in terms of history as well as culture
    • how cool the word classes of adverbs are and their relative freedom within English compared to French

I feel that we often think French is full of exceptions when we learn it as a foreign language - but I would argue that it is actually English that is full of exceptions. Of course, you have languages such as Latin where exceptions are much more closely linked to context (eg noun domum, complement of ‘esse’ to be being equivalent cases, locative cases etc.).